Reconsidering the value of Saddleback

I'm rethinking my initial reaction that the Saddleback forum was largely a waste of time, because it broke no new ground. I'm partly rethinking my view because I'm a journalist and a political junkie, and what for me is "no new ground" is no doubt for many people material they're hearing for the first time. Most folks probably haven't been paying close attention to the race to this point, and it's likely that the novelty of having Rick Warren host this forum brought in viewers who otherwise wouldn't have watched.

Plus, reading this morning's takes on the McCain-Obama-Warren sessions this weekend is instructive about particular strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. I note especially Michelle Cottle's observation (not tied to the Saddleback event, but obviously relevant) that Obama's coolness is not serving his campaign well -- that he lacks the sense of urgency voters seem to want. I note also Sally Quinn's post-Saddleback bit in which she contrasts the reassuring clarity of McCain's responses to the vague nuances of Obama's. She prefers Obama's. Excerpt:

I would rather live in McCain's world than Obama's. But I believe that we live in Obama's world.

More on this in a moment. Bill Kristol's post-Saddleback column nicely bookends Quinn's, drawing a different conclusion from the same basic observation:

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn't particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

[snip]

Third, Obama and McCain really do have different "worldviews," to use Rick Warren's term.

Perhaps the most revealing moment was the two candidates' response to a question about evil. Yes, evil -- that negation of the good that, Friedrich Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, we seem not to have moved beyond.

Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, "do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?"

Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn't be ignored. But then their answers diverged.

Obama said that "we see evil all the time" -- in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be "confronted squarely." And while we can't "erase evil from the world," we can be "soldiers" in the task of confronting it when we see it.

But, Obama added, "Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility" as we confront evil. Why? Because "a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil." After all, "just because we think our intentions are good doesn't always mean that we're going to be doing good."

It's nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions -- indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction.

I think there's some truth in all of these opinions, frankly. Obama's nuance, it seems to me, is another word for vagueness. Quinn, a liberal, thinks Obama's taking a pass on answering Warren's query about when an unborn child (or, if you prefer, the fetus) acquires human rights is a sign of a supple mind. In fact, by refusing to explain his views, Obama was either being purely political, or revealing that he is not a careful or inquisitive thinker about one of the most critical moral and political issues of our time. "Above my pay grade" is a pure dodge. There is a pro-choice answer to that question, one that I happen to disagree with, but that's at least philosophically valid. Obama chose not to give it. Why? And why is it considered intellectually respectable by the likes of Quinn that Obama declined to give a straight answer to this question? There is a certain kind of intellectual that sees muddleheadedness as a virtue. It's the classic liberal weakness: to find, or to seem to find, reasons to excuse evil, or to avoid a confrontation for disreputable reasons.

On the other hand, Kristol views McCain's utter clarity as a sign of virtue. How anybody can emerge from the Bush years and the Iraq experience with the same Manichaean view of the world and America's role in it is flabbergasting. But there it is. If Obama was too abstracted -- and he was -- then McCain was too concrete, and his concreteness was itself a form of ideological abstraction. In other words, by seeming to refuse to recognize complexity in the world and the tragic sense at work in our affairs, McCain evidences living in a world of unreality as well.

Nevertheless, as a political matter, McCain's approach plays much better with Americans. We like a good story, and we like to understand complex matters of morality and policy in terms of story. When Obama made the perfectly reasonable and necessary point that we have inadvertently done evil in the name of good, he should have brought up Abu Ghraib and torture as examples. He should also have spoken of the unplanned and inadvertent evil of getting our soldiers bound up in wars that seemingly have no end, for no compelling national interest. He might have spoken about how our good intentions about expanding home ownership to more Americans led us to foolishly overextend our financial system.

There are many stories Obama could have told about the cost of imprudence, and he could have -- and should have -- planted doubts among voters about where the high-minded, crusading verities regarding the nature of Evil and the proper response to it has gotten the country. But he missed that opportunity.

How does one campaign as a realist in a political culture that rewards idealism? It helps to be a realist, and I don't think Obama is. Still, I don't relate to people who were comforted by Obama's vagueness, or were comforted by McCain's clarity. I don't see wisdom in either man's example. Is that muddleheaded of me?

UPDATE: I just posted a comment below saying that the question Rick Warren posed about abortion was not a theological one, but a legal one: when does the unborn human creature attain to personhood in the eyes of the law? Obama tried to dodge it by saying that it was a theological query. Ross Douthat nails him:

Warren asked a more narrow question, and one that any politician who votes on abortion laws should be able to answer. And of course, as a supporter of Roe and Casey, Obama does have an answer: He thinks that a baby acquires rights when it's born - well, perhaps depending on how and why it happens to be born - and lacks them at every juncture before birth. He just didn't want to come out and say it.